Re: [boost] ATTENTION: Library requirements..

Subject: Re: [boost] ATTENTION: Library requirements..
From: Paul A. Bristow (pbristow_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-01-11 09:42:49

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Boost [mailto:boost-bounces_at_[hidden]] On Behalf Of Raffi Enficiaud
> Sent: 11 January 2016 08:49
> To: boost_at_[hidden]
> Subject: Re: [boost] ATTENTION: Library requirements..
> 
> Le 11/01/16 04:03, Rene Rivera a écrit :
> > Forgot to say..
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Louis Dionne <ldionne.2_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> People can browse the documentation online, which does not require
> >> any additional setup. I would posit that 95% of new users use the
> >> online documentation, and they don't use the offline documentation anyways.
> >>
> >
> > That rationale has made me angry more times than I can count. I do a
> > lot of my Boost work offline. In particular on the train to/from my day job.
> > Specifically I mostly do test results web site work with Google App Engine.
> > And it's infuriating that Google decided that no one works or reads
> > docs offline. Even when faced with the repeated bug reports and
> > feature requests to provide offline docs for GAE (and they aren't
> > alone in the web dev realm in this behavior). I had to resort to web
> > scraping their doc web site (with limited success).
> >
> > Just a data point though ;-)
> >
> 
> I also agree that having offline doc is a important thing: I can add that the navigation is much
faster
> as well, and we can just grep things...
> 
> I like the idea of Andrey Semashev: distributing a separate archive for documentation and reducing
> the size of the distributed archive. For the PDF, I do not know exactly the use case, but I can
image
> having one single file containing everything is something that is useful.

I use the PDF version regularly when updating Boost.Math - mainly to find things that I know are
there (because I wrote them!)  but can't find where.

It's the find/search power that is the killer application. (And it is portable of course).

And all this discussion focussing on the *look* of documentation is ignoring our main weakness -

how to FIND what you want to know???

Paul

---
Paul A. Bristow
Prizet Farmhouse
Kendal UK LA8 8AB
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